At Graceland, the Memphis mansion where Elvis Presley lived, there’s a small black box that holds some of his most personal things. For a long time almost nobody looked inside. Whatever Elvis left in it stayed right where he put it.
Then his granddaughter decided to open it on camera.
Riley Keough is that granddaughter. She’s the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child, and these days she helps look after Graceland and the family’s legacy. A lot of folks know her as an actress from shows like “Daisy Jones & The Six.” Back in 2024 she sat down with Oprah Winfrey, the longtime talk show host, for a TV special about three generations of the Presley family.
Part of that special was filmed right there at Graceland. And at one point Riley brought out the little black box.
“You can look inside it,” she told Oprah.
What makes the box special isn’t that it’s fancy. It’s that it was his, and it got left alone. “It was sort of his most personal things and nothing’s been touched,” Riley said. Think about that for a second. The things one man kept close, tucked away and untouched for all these years.
Oprah started lifting items out one at a time. There was a green American Express card, the kind Elvis actually carried around. It had run out back in May 1972. There was a Polaroid photo. Some ticket stubs. Old papers. Little pieces of an everyday life that happened to belong to one of the most famous men who ever lived.
And then Oprah reached one small thing that stopped her cold.
It was his comb. Just a plain comb, the sort of thing anybody keeps in a drawer. But caught in the teeth of it were strands of Elvis’s own hair, still there after all this time. Nobody had cleaned it out. Nobody had moved it.
“That hair right there. Elvis’ comb. Wow,” Oprah said. “Treasures from Elvis’ black box. Wow.”
The clip below is that exact moment at Graceland, Riley holding the box open and Oprah reaching in. Watch her face when she figures out what she’s looking at.
Oprah opens Elvis’s black box at Graceland with his granddaughter
There’s something about a comb that gets to people more than the big stuff does. You expect a gold record or a flashy jumpsuit from Elvis. A comb with a few of his hairs still in it is a different feeling. It’s the kind of plain thing you’d find in anybody’s house, and that’s probably why it lands so hard.
Riley has spent a good part of her life looking after pieces of her grandfather like this one. She never got to meet him. He was gone years before she was born. The box, and that hair in the comb, are about as close as anyone can get to him now.
Go watch Oprah open it. Her “wow” pretty much says it all.